New Resource: Beating Goliath Examines Successful Campaigns Against Corporations

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

In a recent report called ‘Beating Goliath’, The Democracy Center gathers case studies from previous successful campaigns against corporations, looking at how they won and what we can learn from them. It provides links to many useful resources for activists, and highlights current campaigns engaged in the fight against climate change through targeting corporations. The Democracy Center works globally to help citizens become effective advocates on environmental and social justice issues.

In its Introduction, the authors of ‘Beating Goliath’ explain its purposes:

All across the world people are engaged in urgent battles: on worker rights, protection of the environment, trade, health, and a range of other issues that shape our lives and our futures. In many of these struggles we face a powerful adversary – the corporation. National laws and international trade agreements are drafted under the influence of corporate power. Corporate interests form the donor base of major political parties, and often have bigger balance sheets than the countries they operate in. Waves of deregulation and privatization have eroded limits to corporate accumulation of profit and power. In this hostile environment, groups have had to become more and more sophisticated in how they confront companies in their workplaces and communities.

Struggles to win concessions from corporate power are not new. As the influence and reach of the corporation has grown, so has resistance to it. From early worker struggles for better wages and conditions, to the late 1990s campaign that targeted Shell’s bright yellow logo to stop it sinking an old drilling platform in the North Sea, confronting corporate interests has long been part of the struggle for social and environmental justice.

Groups confronting corporations have a range of politics and use a range of tactics. They include Christian shareholder groups that talk about increasing ‘corporate responsibility’, direct action campaigners that see capitalism itself as the root cause of climate change, well-funded NGOs and confederations of neighbourhood organizations. The Democracy Center designed this resource to be useful for both newcomers to this kind of campaigning and old hands, no matter where they lie on the political or tactical spectrum.

This resource opens with some background on corporate campaigning, and why we think it’s important to take on corporate power through individual campaigns. We then look at a series of wins from corporate targets, with a focus on what we can learn from them as we put together new campaigns. This is followed by introductions to tools and more detailed resources for campaigners fighting corporations – including organizing, research, strategy, communications, coalition building, direct action, shareholder and financier strategies, legal strategies, and consumer strategies. Finally, we’ve included six profiles of climate justice campaigns against corporations that are happening right now, with brief outlines of what they’re campaigning for and how they’re going about it.

And for additional ideas on corporate campaigns, the Spring 2012 issue of Yes! Magazine describes 9 strategies to end corporate rule. They are:

  1. Amend the constitution to end corporate personhood.
  2. Dive into grassroots campaigns.
  3. Hold corporations accountable to our laws.
  4. Get past the propaganda.
  5. Support independent media and keep the Internet free.
  6. Protect the Commons.
  7. Vote. Protect our democracy.
  8. Make your dollars matter.
  9. Get creative to raise awareness.

 

Image Credit:

1. The Democracy Center

Corporate Practices, Human Rights and Health: New Principles, New Questions

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

As more people accept the notion that governments have an obligation to follow certain universal standards of human rights, a new question that has emerged is what are the responsibilities of corporations to follow human rights principles? In just the last year, several new developments have put this question on the agenda in various settings.

In June 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council approved the document Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, developed over the last six years.

The United Nations

Under the slogan “Protect, Respect and Remedy”, the document describes three obligations:

“The first is the State duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business enterprises, through appropriate policies, regulation, and adjudication. The second is the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, which means that business enterprises should act with due diligence to avoid infringing on the rights of others and to address adverse impacts with which they are involved. The third is the need for greater access by victims to effective remedy, both judicial and non-judicial.”

In October 2011, the European Commission issued a  new corporate social responsibility policy for 2011-2014, stating that the Commission “expects all European enterprises to meet the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, as defined in the UN Guiding Principles,” and “invites EU Member States to develop by the end of 2012 national plans for the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles.”

And in Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has announced that its Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights will this year focus on business and human rights. One of the Commissioners has said:

“The target for this thematic study is an ASEAN Guideline that is fully compliant with the UN frameworks, especially the Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework for Business and Human Rights and the Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights which were endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council.”

These recent initiatives build on the United Nations Global Compact which started more than a decade ago after then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on business leaders to embrace shared values as a way to promote stability in the new era of globalization. So far, more than 6,800 companies in 140 countries have joined the compact by sending letters from their CEOs and agreeing to report annually on their activities. The box below lists the 10 principles of the Global Compact. “A lot of global challenges require active engagement of business,” says Matthias Stausberg, spokesman for the United National Global Compact, an initiative for companies that voluntarily commit to aligning operations with 10 principles covering human rights, the environment, labor and corruption.

What does this new attention on corporate responsibility for following human rights principles have to do with health and the impact of business practices on population health? So far, the existing codes have focused more on labor and environmental practices of corporations than on health consequences of the products that corporations produce and market. Labor and environmental practices certainly have a major impact on health but the current focus does not provide an obvious entry point for addressing the world’s most important causes of premature mortality and preventable deaths: rising rates of non-communicable disease and injuries. The concerns raised about the production and marketing practices of the food, tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical industries at the UN High Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases in New York City last September pointed to the importance of these factors in causing global epidemics.

Here are some questions that public health and human rights professionals, researchers and advocates, government officials and business leaders will need to consider if a human rights approach can be applied to reducing harmful business practices.

  1. Do businesses have a right to produce and market products that have been demonstrated to harm public health?
  2. Do businesses have an obligation to disclose to the public what they know about the harmful effects of products they produce?
  3. Do governments have an obligation to protect their citizens from business practices that harm health?
  4. Does providing misleading or untruthful information about the health consequences of a product violate human rights?
  5. What standards are used to determine whether a business has provided adequate judicial or non-judicial remedies to consumers whose health has been harmed by their products?

For the public health community, the notion that corporations have a responsibility to follow basic human rights principles has the potential to suggest new approaches to better balancing the rights of governments and corporations. But for human rights to move from an aspirational statement to a practical strategy, human rights and public health practitioners will need to forge new tools to bring this perspective into the policy, legal and political arenas.

 

Image Credits:

1. Whiskeygonebad via Flickr.

Super Bowl Ads: Good for Business, Bad for Health

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

On Sunday, more than 110 million Americans watched the Super Bowl, some for the football but more than half, according to one survey, as much to watch the ads as the game. This year 36 corporations paid about $3.5 million for each 30 second ad that they hoped would drum up business on American advertisers’ biggest day. Total ad revenue is expected to reach $245 million, the highest ever.  To entertain themselves during the game, Americans will spend an estimated $11 billion on snacks, game-related merchandise and apparel.

This orgy of commercialism provides a lens through which to examine the health of this country and the power of corporations to shape health behavior and health policy in ways that are good for business but bad for the well-being of the American people.

Previews of the ads shown in Sunday’s games reveal some common themes. One analyst noted that based on these ads, it is clear Americans are desperately seeking their inner child, love animals (especially dogs and chimps) and will buy anything if it is linked to sex.  The Mad Men who created these ads have settled on appeals to the lowest common denominator, using their neuromarketing brain scans to decide that the precognitive parts of the brain are more susceptible to persuasion than the frontal lobes that might process real information about the product.

Who advertises on Super Bowl?  A business newsletter found that six of eight top advertisers in the last 10 years are Anheuser-Busch, now part of the Belgian-Brazilian alcohol conglomerate InBev (spending $246.million on Super Bowl ads), PepsiCo ($209.7 million), General Motors ($135.2 million), Yum! Brands, a fast food corporation, ($67.8 million), Coca Cola ($61 million) and Ford ($36.3 million).  Overall, advertisers have spent $2.5 billion on Super Bowl ads in the last 10 years ; the top four categories are autos, film, food — including snacks and fast food — and beverages, both alcohol and soda.

According to public health researchers, poor diet and physical inactivity were the cause of 365,000 deaths in the United States in 2000, alcohol consumption 85,000 deaths, motor vehicle crashes 43,000 and sexual behavior 20,000. A look at the Super Bowl ads shows they overwhelmingly encourage the behaviors and lifestyles that contribute to these deaths: eating too much food high in fat, sugar and salt; youth drinking and drinking as a way of asserting sexuality and adulthood; driving that emphasizes speed and macho rather than safety; and sex that emphasizes body parts rather than intimacy.

When the ads do mention health, it is often in ways designed to ensure irrelevancy. A Super Bowl ad promoting Doritos (8 gms fat, 200 mgs sodium and 140 calories for each 11 Flamas chips) ends with the tagline “Eat Responsibly”– somewhat like thinking that telling a person with major depression to “Have a nice day” is good therapy.

In a Coca Cola ad, a polar bear urges its companion to drink a bottle of Coke (65 gms of high fructose corn syrup and 57 mg of caffeine) to allay its fears about the Super Bowl. The closing message: “Coca Cola: Open Happiness.” Like some evil Mary Poppins, the polar bears encourage viewers to swallow with 15 spoonfuls of sugar the message that consuming products that contribute to obesity, diabetes and other diet-related health conditions is the road to happiness.

In 1976 and again in 2001, an increasingly pro-corporate US Supreme Court reversed its prior opinions and granted limited First Amendment protection to commercial speech, deciding that advertisements further the societal interest in the free flow of information to allow consumers to make more informed decisions.  Viewers of Sunday’s Super Bowl ads would have a hard time finding much information about the products that were advertised. And while the health care industry may benefit from more cases of heart disease, auto accidents and alcohol-related liver disease, it’s tough to imagine the societal interest realized by promoting the chronic diseases and injuries that are overwhelming our health care system and burdening families.

To add insult to injury, corporations can deduct the full cost of the advertisements aired on the Super Bowl – and in all other media — as tax-deductible business expenses. Thus tax payers forego the tax revenue that would come were these expenses not deductible, then pay the heath care costs associated with the consumption these ads encourage.

In today’s economy, it seems churlish, even unpatriotic, to criticize the corporate celebration of consumption represented by Super Bowl ads. But in a country that spends more on health care than any other nation and with poorer results, isn’t it fair to ask whether patriotic businesses would choose to relentlessly promote products associated with premature death and needless suffering? And whether patriotic elected officials would allow food, tobacco, alcohol and auto corporations to become the dominant health educator for the nation, then expect tax payers to foot the bills for the consequences of their messages?

 

Image Credits:

1. Coca-Cola

2. Kevin Herrera

The Manufacture of Lifestyle: The Role of Corporations in Unhealthy Living

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

What causes unhealthy lifestyles? In a new article now online at the Journal of Public Health Policy, I make the case that corporate business practices such as product design, marketing and retailing and corporate political practices such as lobbying, campaign contributions and sponsored research are fundamental causes of the of the lifestyles associated with the growing global burdens of non-communicable diseases and injuries.

By focusing attention on lifestylers, the organizations and institutions that shape lifestyles, as well as on the behaviors associated with unhealthy living (e.g., tobacco use, high fat, sugar and salt diets, excess alcohol consumption and so on), we expand our options for developing health-promoting public policies.

The figure below, described in detail in the article, illustrates some of the pathways by which corporate practices influence lifestyle.

This boy sells cigarettes at a small shop in Bangladesh, where over 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15 — a target consumer market for Philip Morris International.

In the article, I suggest four actions that public health professionals can take to advance policies that reduce unhealthy lifestyles.

1. Encourage governments to set advertising standards prohibiting promotion of unhealthy products and making misleading health claims.

2. Strengthen laws making corporations liable for the health-related damage associated with products they produce and promote.

3. Actively promote healthier, more sustainable lifestyles, addressing the demand for unhealthy products as well as the supply.

4. Demand political reforms that reduce corporations’ privileged voice in public policy.

The Occupy Wall Street movement and its critique – a world where fewer than one percent of the population determines the living conditions for the other ninety-nine per cent – suggests the potential to mobilize people in opposition to a corporate-controlled world. Our generation’s public health challenge: Can we find ways to link the Occupy Wall Street spirit to the task of overcoming the corporate control of lifestyles that are killing us?

 

Image Credit:

1. Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Appropriating Medicine and Public Health for Marketing Ill Health

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

In the last century, corporations have found new ways to appropriate medical authority to improve marketing of products that harm the health of the public. In a special section of the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers describe some of the ways that the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries have undermined medical and public health professionalism in order to advance their economic interests.

In the first article,[1] James Mosher, a long-time alcohol policy researcher, describes how the distilled spirits industry developed new products such as alcopops, sweetened soda-like beverages, to regain the youth market after losing market share to beer makers. The article focuses on Smirnoff Vodka brand, a product of Diageo, the world’s largest producer of distilled spirits. Through sophisticated marketing, public relations and lobbying campaigns, Diageo was able to overcome public health opposition to win tax and regulatory changes that allowed them to target their products at young people, especially young female drinkers. These victories enabled Diageo to regain market share among young drinkers and to secure brand loyalty from future generations of spirits drinkers. In achieving their business objective, Diageo undercut progress toward the national health goal of reducing youth drinking.

Smirnoff Ice, a citrus-flavored malt beverage

In a second article on the alcohol industry,[2] David Jernigan of the Johns Hopkins Center on Alcohol Marketing to Youth at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health – and a CHW Contributing Writer – describes the International Center for Alcohol Policies, created by the global alcohol industry to advance its business, political and scientific objectives. Jernigan documents how ICAP has sought to counter the World Health Organization and independent alcohol researchers by producing reports, sponsoring scientific meetings and commissioning industry-friendly researchers to contest scientific findings that threaten industry profits.

In another article Allan M. Brandt,[3] the Harvard historian who wrote The Cigarette Century: The Rise, fall and Deadly Persistence of Product that Defined America, also looks at industry efforts to challenge medical and scientific research that show a product’s harm. Brandt explains how the tobacco industry “invented the modern problem of conflict of interest” by seeking to “erode, condemn and confuse” the growing body of scientific evidence that “threatened to destroy its prized, highly popular and exclusive product.”

Finally, Joseph Ross and his colleagues[4] at the Yale University School of Medicine analyze how pharmaceutical industry practices “distort the medical literature and undermine clinical trial research, explicitly by obscuring information that is relevant to patients and physicians.” Among the practices they examine are seeding trials, publication planning, messaging, ghost writing and selective publication and reporting of trial outcomes.

In an editorial[5] accompanying the special section, David J. Rothman, a historian at Columbia University, suggests policy options for reducing harmful corporate influences on professional practice of medicine and public health. These include requiring food, tobacco and alcohol companies to disclose all gifts and funds given to physicians, as is now required for the pharmaceutical industry, and strengthening federal regulation of health claims made by the food and alcohol industries, paralleling the new authority given to the Food and Drug Administration to provide oversight of tobacco industry advertising claims. Rothman also urges academic medical centers to ensure that corporate research grants to its physicians are not “marketing ventures in disguise.”

These articles make an important contribution to the small but growing literature that compares the strategies that different industries use in order to develop more effective public health approaches to minimizing their harm. For example, several comparisons of the food and tobacco industries have analyzed their similarities and differences.[6, 7, 8, 9] More specifically, researchers have compared the use and misuse of health claims[10] and the value of regulation and self-regulation, [11, 12]analyzed how different industries have used the legal concept of preemption to weaken regulation;[13, 14]and examined the use of commercial speech protections by the food, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries.[15] Some studies look at the cumulative impact of several industries on single outcomes, e.g. the influence of the food, alcohol and tobacco industries on cancer[16] or on classes of outcomes, e.g., these same three industries influence on NCDs.[17] Finally, several analysts have compared the success and limitations of public health strategies to counter industry influences such as litigation,[18, 19] media advocacy,[20] counter advertising,[21, 22] and advocacy campaigns.[23]

The articles in the American Journal of Public Health special section and the others cited above show how corporations and their allies have sought either to use the authority and credibility of medicine and public health to advance their business interests, or, failing that, to undermine their legitimacy or sow confusion. Too often, scientists and their institutions have entered into Faustian bargains, trading their public trust for industry financial support for their research. Public health and biomedical researchers now have both an opportunity and a responsibility to undo this damage and restore public credibility by advancing a research and policy agenda that puts the public’s health first.

Possible goals for such an agenda include ongoing surveillance of business practices that endanger health in order to provide early warning signs for public health action; research on the effects of misleading or deceptive health claims and the effectiveness of various strategies to discourage such claims; and the development and enforcement of  university and medical center standards to prevent researchers from becoming unidentified marketing agents for specific products, companies or industries.

To date, few governments have the political will to advance such an agenda and non-governmental organizations lack the mandates, capacity or resources to take on these tasks. Perhaps mobilized public health and biomedical researchers can help to spark the changes needed to better protect the health of the 99% of the world’s population whose health now suffers because of the practices of the corporations owned by the 1%.

 

References

[1] Mosher JF. Joe Camel in a Bottle: Diageo, the Smirnoff Brand, and the Transformation of the Youth Alcohol Market. Am J Public Health. 2012;102(1):56-63.

[2]Jernigan DH. Global Alcohol Producers, Science, and Policy: The Case of the International Center for Alcohol Policies. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1):80-89.

[3] Brandt AM. Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1): 63-71.

[4] Ross JS, Gross CP, Krumholz HM. Promoting Transparency in Pharmaceutical Industry-Sponsored Research. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1): 72-80.

[5] Rothman DJ. Consequences of Industry Relationships for Public Health and Medicine. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1):55.

[6] Brownell KD, Warner KE. The perils of ignoring history: Big Tobacco played dirty and millions died. How similar is Big Food? Milbank Q. 2009; 87(1):259-94.

[7] Alderman J, Daynard RA. Applying lessons from tobacco litigation to obesity lawsuits. Am J Prev Med. 2006 Jan;30(1):82-8. Erratum in: Am J Prev Med. 2006;30(4):363.

[8] Kersh R, Morone J. The politics of obesity: seven steps to government action. Health Aff (Millwood). 2002;21(6): 42-5.

[9] Courtney B. Is obesity really the next tobacco? Lessons learned from tobacco for obesity litigation. Ann Health Law. 2006 ;15(1):61-106.

[10] Ellwood KC, Trumbo PR, Kavanaugh CJ. How the US Food and Drug Administration evaluates the scientific evidence for health claims. Nutr Rev. 2010;68(2):114-21.

[11] Sugarman SD. Performance-based regulation: enterprise responsibility for reducing death, injury, and disease caused by consumer products. J Health Polit Policy Law. 2009 Dec; 34(6):1035-77.

[12] : Jernigan DH. Public health tools for holding self-regulators accountable: lessons from the alcohol experience. Health Promot Pract. 2011 May;12(3):336-40.

[13] Annas GJ. Good law from tragic facts—Congress, the FDA, and preemption. N Engl J Med. 2009; 361(12):1206-11.

[14] Gorovitz E, Mosher J, Pertschuk M. Preemption or prevention?: lessons from efforts to control firearms, alcohol, and tobacco. J Public Health Policy.1998;19(1):36-50.

[15] Orentlicher D. The commercial speech doctrine in health regulation: the clash between the public interest in a robust First Amendment and the public interest in effective protection from harm. Am J Law Med. 2011;37(2-3):299-314.

[16] Freudenberg N, Galea S, Fahs M. Changing corporate practices to reduce cancer disparities. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2008 Feb; 19(1):26-40.

[17] Beaglehole R, Bonita R, Horton R, et al. Priority actions for the non-communicable. disease crisis. Lancet 2011; 377: 1438–47.

[18] Parmet WE, Daynard RA. The new public health litigation. Annu Rev Public Health. 2000;21:437-54.

[19] Lytton TD. Using litigation to make public health policy: theoretical and empirical challenges in assessing product liability, tobacco, and gun litigation. J Law Med Ethics. 2004; 32(4):556-64.

[20] Dorfman L, Wallack L, Woodruff K. More than a message: framing public health advocacy to change corporate practices. Health Educ Behav. 2005 Jun; 32(3):320-36.

[21] Agostinelli G, Grube JW. Alcohol counter-advertising and the media. A review of recent research. Alcohol Res Health. 2002; 26(1):15-21.

[22] Agostinelli G, Grube JW. Tobacco counter-advertising: a review of the literature and a conceptual model for understanding effects. J Health Commun 2003; 8(2): 07- 27.

[23] Freudenberg N, Bradley SP, Serrano M. Public health campaigns to change industry practices that damage health: an analysis of 12 case studies. Health Educ Behav. 2009;36(2):230-49.

 

Image Credits:

1. Corporations and Health Watch

2. Seidoger via flickr.

3. Gullig via flickr.

4. Rennett Stowe via flickr.

Big Alcohol‘s Global Playbook: New markets, reduced regulation and lower taxes

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

As the global alcohol industry becomes increasingly concentrated in a few big international companies, its practices around the world become remarkably similar. Public health professionals seeking to reduce the harm from alcohol can benefit from documenting and analyzing these trends and from studying the efficacy of differing responses. Several recent reports illustrate these convergences.

Developing New Markets

To expand, a company needs to develop new markets. In recent years, changing tastes in alcohol consumption, the global recession, and continuing competition from other multinationals as well as smaller national companies have created a fierce battle for recruiting new cohorts of drinkers.

Two attractive markets for the alcohol industry are youth drinkers, who promise to become lifetime customers, and women, who constitute the half of the world’s population that still drinks less.

In an article in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health, James Mosher describes how Diageo, the world’s largest producer of distilled spirits, has used the Smirnoff brand of vodka to attract new youth drinkers. By developing alcopops, beverages that taste like soft drinks, including new fruit flavors, competing with beer makers to win over young drinkers, and engaging in active lobbying to win favorable regulatory rules for these new beverages, Diageo has seen its Smirnoff vodka sales take off.

In Canada and the United States, wine makers have targeted women, especially “Moms,” with new wine brands such as Mommy’s Time Out, MommyJuice and Girl’s Night Out. In an article in the Toronto Star last month, Ann Dowsett Johnston analyzed the growth of women-targeted alcohol advertising, examining  the new wine brands, alcopops, and the various vodka drinks produced for women. In an interview with the Star, CHW Contributing Writer David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins University said, “In the past 25 years, there has been tremendous pressure on females to keep up with the guys. Now the industry’s right there to help them. They’ve got their very own beverages, tailored to women. They’ve got their own individualized, feminized drinking culture. I’m not sure that this was what Gloria Steinem had in mind.”

Influencing Governments, Coopting Regulations

Logo of Alcohol Concern, a UK advocacy group

Another strategy Big Alcohol uses to advance its business interests is to weaken and coopt government’s regulatory apparatus to better meet its needs. National leaders in business-friendly states are often eager to help. In New Zealand, for example, the government last month appointed Katherine Rich, CEO of the Food and Grocery Council, to the new Health Promotion Agency Establishment Board, an entity that replaces the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand, the Health Sponsorship Council and some health promotion activities of the Ministry of Health. Professor Doug Sellman of Alcohol Action New Zealand observed that “Katherine Rich has been one of the most vociferous defenders of the alcohol industry’s desire to continue to pour as much alcohol into New Zealand society as it can. [She] has used her role as an industry spokesperson to attack community groups advocating a stronger Alcohol Reform Bill for the sake of the health of New Zealanders.”

In the United Kingdom, the Conservative government initiated the “Public Health Responsibility Deal for Alcohol,” an industry-public partnership that seeks to “foster a culture of responsible drinking.”  These Responsibility Deals develops voluntary industry pledges. According to a recent analysis in the Globe, the newsletter of the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance, “the critics of the pledges say they are not based on evidence of what works, and were largely written by Government and industry officials before the health community was invited to join the proceedings.” As a result, many health and advocacy organizations have refused to participate in the process.

Reducing Taxes

Another way that Big Alcohol companies maintain their profits is by finding ways to pay less tax. According to the global watchdog organization Tackle Tax Havens, SAB Miller, a leading global London-based brewing conglomerate, uses transfer pricing to avoid paying taxes in many countries. SAB Miller has 65 tax haven companies and its tax avoidance strategies are estimated to reduce the company’s global tax bill by as much as 20 percent, giving the company an advantage over local competitors who do pay national taxes and depriving national governments of needed revenue. Tackle Tax Havens estimates that SB Miller’s tax planning strategies have lost the treasuries of developing nations up to 20 million pounds, enough to put a quarter of a million children in school. Its turnover in 2009 was 12 billion pounds and its pretax profits 16 percent.

In the United Kingdom, the new business-friendly Conservative government reversed a 10 percent increase in the duty on hard cider, again depriving the government of revenues and losing an opportunity to reduce problem drinking. In Scotland, on the other hand, the government has proposed a new minimum price per unit on alcohol, a move intended to discourage volume discounts that serve as loss leaders for alcohol companies but encourage heavy drinking among vulnerable populations.

In sum, Big Alcohol companies are using a variety of strategies to advance their business interests, from targeting new markets and coopting and weakening regulations to opposing new taxes or lowering existing ones. These practices promote the health of their bottom lines but not of the population in the nations where they do business.

 

Image Credits:

1. MommyJuice

2. Alcohol Concern

3. ActionAidUK

Do Regulations Kill Jobs?

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

According to House Speaker John Boehner, “job-killing regulations… are strangling employers all over the country” and contributing to the nation’s persistently high rates of unemployment. Last month, President Obama reinforced this theme by asking the Environmental Protection Agency to back off more stringent ozone regulations, citing the “importance of reducing regulatory burdens” during trying economic times. In recent weeks, several independent observers have examined this charge in order to assess the evidence on the impact of health, environmental and other regulations on employment.

Writing for Pro Publica, Marian Wang interviewed several economists who have studied the issue and concluded that “the evidence so far is that the overall effect on jobs is minimal. Regulations do destroy some jobs, but they also create others. Mostly, they just shift jobs within the economy.” Wang also cites a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that shows that in the first half of 2011, employers attribute regulations as the cause of 0.2 to 0.3 percent of jobs lost as part of mass layoffs, a negligible fraction.

Supporters of regulations that protect public health offer two responses to the charges of job loss. First, they say, many regulations simply shift jobs from one sector to another, sometimes actually increasing employment opportunities. For example, the requirement to clean up contaminated brownfields, abandoned toxic waste dumps in populated areas, created thousands of new jobs in environmental remediation. Thus, any assessment of the impact of regulations on employment must examine both jobs lost and jobs created. To look at only one side of the equation is like saying in the early twentieth century the auto industry killed jobs by putting carriage drivers out of business.

The second defense of regulations is that they achieve social benefits – improved health, for example, or reductions in premature mortality, that outweigh their costs. In a recent op-ed column describing opponents of public health regulation, veteran consumer activists Ralph Nader noted, “These same Republicans get in their cars with their children and put on their seat belts. Out of sight are the air bags ready to deprive them of their freedom to go through the windshield in a crash.” Nader went on to observe, “The jobs these regulations may be ‘killing’ are those that would have swelled the funeral industry, or some jobs in the healthcare and disability-care industry. On the other hand, by not being injured, workers stay on the job and do not drain the workers’ compensation funds or hamper the operations of their employers.”

Earlier this month, Public Citizen issued a report about five regulations that spurred innovation and a higher quality of economic growth. The report noted that ‘when federal agencies implement rules for efficiency, worker safety, or public health and welfare, companies need to reformulate their products and services to comply. And so begins good ol’ American competition. To comply with federal standards, companies need to invest in research and development, which often yields to new products and systems that both solve public policy problems and, often, boost business. The result? A brighter idea emerges.

The bottom line: an honest assessment of regulations requires a comprehensive look at their benefits and costs. As Roger Noll, co-director of the Program on Regulatory Policy at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, told Wang, “The issue in regulation always should be whether it delivers benefits that justify the cost. The effect of regulation on jobs has nothing to do with the mess we’re in. The current rhetoric about regulation killing jobs is nothing more than not letting a good crisis go to waste.”

Source: Public Citizen

What Role for Public Health in Occupy Wall Street?

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

National media attention on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City and around the country provides new opportunities for public health professionals, researchers and activists concerned about the impact of corporations on health. In this post, I summarize some recent commentary on the health dimensions of Occupy Wall Street and invite Corporations and Health Watch readers to contribute suggestions for linking the demonstrations to public health concerns.

In a statement entitled “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street proclaimed:

“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known…

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization. They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions… They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity… They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit… They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.”

Writing for the Center for Public Integrity’s IWatchNews, Wendell Potter observed:

“The lobbyists for U.S. health insurers surely have to be feeling a little uneasy knowing that thousands of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who have been marching and protesting in Washington as well as New York and other cities might target them in the days ahead. After all, the headquarters of the insurers’ biggest lobbying and PR group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., is just blocks away from Freedom Plaza, where the demonstrators have set up camp, and problems with health insurers appear to be near the top of the list of protesters’ concerns.

Health Care for America Now, an umbrella advocacy group that played a key role in the health care reform debate, last week analyzed the 546 comments that had been posted by then on “ We are the 99 percent” Tumblr site. It found that 262 of the comments mention such problems as getting denials for doctor-ordered care from their insurance companies and having to forego treatment because of hefty out-of-pocket costs.”

Writing for the Mother Nature Network, Russell McLendon points out the environmental concerns of OWS:

“Fresh off their own nonviolent stand outside the White House — where they spent two weeks protesting the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline — the re-energized U.S. environmental movement has now found an even bigger, broader stage. And like most factions of Occupy Wall Street, it seems perfectly happy to share that stage with other interests.

For too long, Wall Street has been occupying the offices of our government, and the cloakrooms of our legislatures,’ wrote Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, in an email to supporters before the march. ‘They’ve been a constant presence, rewarded not with pepper spray in the face but with yet more loopholes and tax breaks and subsidies and contracts. You could even say Wall Street’s been occupying our atmosphere, since any attempt to do anything about climate change always run afoul of the biggest corporations on the planet. So it’s a damned good thing the tables have turned.’”

These commentaries show some of the ways that Occupy Wall Street has raised the issue of the impact of corporate practices on wellbeing. We invite CHW readers to suggest additional connections between the demonstrations and public health concerns, to analyze OWS activities from a public health perspective or to share relevant observations on the demonstrations from others. Send responses to info@corporationsandhealth.org.

 

Image Credit:

Leica 1A via Flickr.

Corporations Undermine UN Effort to Reduce Chronic Diseases

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

Cross-posted from Common Dreams.

While much of the world’s attention focused on the UN debate about Palestinian statehood last week, the General Assembly took up another issue that garnered less media scrutiny, even though its outcome could prevent millions of premature deaths in coming decades. On September 19th and 20th, 30 heads of State and 100 other senior ministers and experts met at the UN General Assembly’s first high level summit on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) to discuss how to reduce the burdens of such conditions as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases.

Meeting at the UN Summit on Non-Communicable Diseases at the UN on Sept 20

These conditions cause about 35 million deaths a year, of which 80 percent occur in low and middle-income countries and one quarter among people younger than 60 years. By 2030, NCDs will cause more than three quarters of all deaths in the world. While the UN has previously recognized HIV, tuberculosis and malaria as threats to economic development and global security, this was the first time the UN acknowledged that non-communicable disease also jeopardized economic well-being.

The NCD summit was an important step in shaping a coordinated global response to these conditions but unlike infectious diseases, where few organizations profit directly from their spread, powerful industries depend on encouraging consumption of products like tobacco, alcohol, unhealthy food and automobiles that have fueled epidemics of non-communicable diseases. Thus, the summit previewed the great public health battle of this period. On one side are the public health professionals, advocacy organizations and local officials who have to cope with the rising tide of NCDs fueled by the growing consumption of tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food. On the other are industries built on the model of profiting by promoting unhealthy lifestyles and products.
Participants in the UN meeting recognized this conflict. In his remarks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon observed that “there is a well-documented and shameful history of certain players in industry who ignored the science – sometimes even their own research – and put public health at risk to protect their own profits.” He went on to note that “there are many, many more industry giants which acted responsibly,” sounding a conference theme that disease promotion was the work of a few bad apples.

In the lead up to the conference, industry lobbyists worked hard to persuade wealthy nations to look out for business interests. According to the Washington Post, a confidential summary of the negotiations on the summit’s political declaration showed that US negotiators threatened to scuttle the document if it even raised the issue of using trade agreements as a vehicle for protecting public health. The Canadian Medical Association charged that Canada had been instrumental in removing a passage that would have limited the impact that food and alcohol corporations have on health policies and in failing to address trade-related barriers to global health.

A main issue dividing meeting participants was whether the 2001 Doha Declaration, which allowed low-income countries to compel drug companies to allow generic drugs for use in their own countries, could be applied to drugs for NCDs. The Doha amendment refers to HIV, TB, malaria “and other epidemics,” language that led one activist to observe that this agreement “was not meant to be so narrowly interpreted… it was intended to address all public health crises.”   Jay Taylor, a vice-president of The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, explained the opposing position to the Post, “Compulsory licenses are intended to be used to address health emergencies and to provide urgent access in situations where there is little or no availability of existing effective medicines. This situation is clearly not the case in the context of the growing burden of noncommunicable diseases.” Tellingly, the summit’s final statement does not use the word epidemic, even though the number of diabetes cases, for example, increased from 300 million worldwide in 2009 to 366 million in 2010.

Deputy Secretary-General Ransford Smith speaks at an event at UN NCD Meeting

A second debate was whether international standards of corporate conduct should be voluntary or mandatory. Business favored voluntary codes, arguing companies were better equipped to implement standards and that mandates threaten jobs and economic growth. Public health activists pointed to the scientific evidence that voluntary standards rarely lead to meaningful changes in corporate behavior.Two other key issues led to conflict. The first was who should participate in the meeting.  Industry insisted that “all sectors” of society should be represented while public health advocates argued industry participation was inappropriate. One hundred forty three non-governmental organizations from around the world created the Conflicts of Interest Coalition and urged that the NCD summit and other forums for policy development should be “free from industry involvement” because of the “obvious conflicts of interest associated with food, alcohol, beverage and other industries that are primarily answerable to shareholders.”

At the end of the meeting, many participants expressed disappointment. While the summit acknowledged “the fundamental conflict of interest between the tobacco industry and public health,” no such statement was made about the food, alcohol, automobile or pharmaceutical industries. Unlike tobacco, these industries also produce products that contribute to health, but in recent decades they have increasingly followed the playbook of the tobacco industry: making campaign contributions and lobbying to oppose public health regulation, aggressively promoting unhealthy products in low and middle income nations when wealthy countries regulate their practices, and distorting scientific evidence that implicates their products in global epidemics.

In the final analysis, industry succeeded at the summit in avoiding direct challenges to its role in promoting disease and national governments refused to set specific targets for NCD reduction, a prerequisite for coordinated global action. These outcomes make it hard to be optimistic that the meeting opened a path for more forceful action to take on the world’s leading killers.

On the other hand, the UN meeting did show the potential for a global movement to challenge corporate influences on health. A few world leaders spoke out forcefully. Torphong Chaiyasan, the Deputy Minister of Health for Thailand, told the meeting that “many large companies contributed to the non-communicable disease problem and continue to try to weaken public health policy.” The organizations that signed on to the Conflict of Interests Statement represent tens of thousands of health activists from around the world. “I am very, very optimistic about the creation of a social movement. The evidence is clear that it can be done,” George Alleyne, a physician who once headed the Pan American Health Organization, told the Washington Post earlier this week. Today corporations have more resources and power to shape health than this emerging movement, but the future health of the world depends on changing that equation.

Image Credits:

1.     ComSec via Flickr.

2.     ComSec via Flickr.

Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement Threatens Public Health

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

Increasingly corporations and their allies are using trade agreements as vehicles for achieving policy changes that even the most business-friendly legislatures would have trouble passing. A case in the point is the new Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently being negotiated in Chicago with the goal of completing an agreement in time for an Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation Meeting in Honolulu this November. The United States’ TPP partners are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. These negotiations include agreements around tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical trade that could have a deep influence on public health. Public health advocates fear that the TPP might ask signatory nations to weaken existing public health protections.

US Trade Representative Ron Kirk

The Center for Policy Analysis on Trade and Health (CPATH), an organization that brings a public health voice to the debate on trade and sustainable development, has worked to mobilize various constituencies to speak out publicly against U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk’s proposals to increase the prices of medicines and to make tobacco products cheaper and easier to buy. They also call for greater public health representation and transparency in trade policy.

Several groups have joined this effort. For example, Dr. James Madara wrote to Kirk on behalf of the American Medical Association earlier this month, “The AMA strongly urges you to ensure that tobacco products and alcoholic beverages are excluded from all provisions of the TPP and any other trade agreements… Our request is consistent with longstanding AMA policy that ‘international trade agreements recognize that health and public health concerns take priority over commercial interest, and that trade negotiations be conducted in a transparent manner and with full attention to health concerns and participation by the public health community.’”

One issue of concern is tobacco giant Phillip Morris International’s (PMI) effort to use trade provisions to claim that graphic warning labels on cigarette packages (as mandated by several nations) violate trade agreements that protect the company’s trademark rights and related intellectual property rights. According to CPATH, the TPP could strengthen PMI’s hand. The tobacco and drug industries’ representatives are members of the influential and confidential trade advisory committees that guide the Trade Representative. Another concern is that trade agreements will increase the price of prescription drugs, as happened with the Central America Free Trade Agreement.

Some elected officials have also joined the fight against trade agreements that value business interests over health. Congressmen John Lewis, Pete Stark, Charles Rangel, Earl Blumenthal and Lloyd Doggett recently wrote Kirk noting that they expected an “improved public health standard” in the final TPP agreement.

As CPATH observed, “It’s time to put an end to trade agreements that make life-saving medicines too expensive, and deadly tobacco products too cheap. We call for a change of course to a new high performance trade policy that improves and protects health.”

For more on the TPP see CPATH’s slide show.

Image Credits:

1.     U.S. Mission via Flickr.

2.     TPPWatch.Org